Sentence of the day

Yesterday we talked about shape-shifting reptiles; what are they, what do they want and why is Donald Rumsfeld failing to deny being one.

You are so going to click on this link.

Some animals deserve to go extinct

Scientists at the University of St Andrews studying beaked whales, a species that frequently becomes beached in Britain, concluded that they were extraordinarily timid creatures that were scared “by virtually anything unusual”, despite being the size of a rhinoceros and weighing the same as a London bus.

Pussies. If I was the size of a rhinoceros and weighed as much as a London bus, I wouldn’t be scared of anything. Well, maybe my big sister and my mother-in-law, but that’s all.

This comes from a story in the Daily Telegraph headed “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”. You know where I’m heading – yes, I looked at the paper cited in the article, “Beaked Whales Respond to Simulated and Actual Navy Sonar” published at PlosOne. It isn’t peer-reviewed that I can see but it was edited (maybe that is the same thing) by Simon Thrush from NIWA which is good enough for me. The paper does not mention wind farms. Not once.

One expects this level of meretricious “reporting” from the Guardian, the BBC and so on, but what has it come to that we can no longer trust the Daily Telegraph?

UPDATE

Paul Litterick in the Comments says he cannot find the offending article online. That, it turns out, is because the Telegraph yanked it and has since published this:

Correction: whales and wind farms

Scientists studying why whales strand themselves said yesterday there is no known direct link between those strandings and off-shore wind farms, although the construction of turbines may affect the mammals’ behaviour.

Prof Ian Boyd, of the University of St Andrews, said the construction of offshore renewable energy sites is likely to cause some species to move to other areas and to distrub [sic] their feeding and reproductive cycles. At present it is not possible to predict precisely how this will affect their populations.

However, he wished to correct a report on this website this week that said there was a proven link between off-shore wind farms and strandings.

The professor said a quotation attributed to him in a press release issued by the university, which discussed strandings related to sonar emissions from naval vessels and which suggested renewable energy sources also contributed to the disturbance of whales, had been taken out of context.

We are happy to make this clear.

That distrubing literal (which is what we in the trade call a spelling mistake) is a bit embarrassing – editorials, apologies and corrections really should be error-free. One blames the Australian subs. 

More to the point, it may seem from the Telegraph’s correction that the error in the original text was not the fault of the reporter but of the idiot at the university who sent out the press release. But I spotted it and I’m not paid to, unlike the reporter. Inexcusable.

There should be a paper in all Media Studies courses called “Press releases are not gospel, they are not news: fact-check them”.  

Yvonne du Fresne

The writer Yvonne du Fresne died on Sunday, aged 81. Her funeral will be held at the Harbour City chapel on the corner of Cockburn Street and Onepu Rd, Kilbirnie, at 2pm on Thursday (tomorrow). 

After winning the PEN best first book award for her 1980 short-story collection Farvel, she was twice runner-up in the NZ Book Awards, first for the 1982 novel The Book of Ester and then for the 1985 short-story collection The Growing of Astrid Westergaard. Her books are suffused with her Danish-French Huguenot background: in her last published book, the 1996 novel Motherland, Astrid returns to Denmark and has a reunion with her Danish relatives. There is a last novel which she worked on for years but remains unpublished. 

She will probably be remembered most for her short stories which Maurice Gee calls “beautifully fresh stuff, unlike anything we’d had before. Danes in New Zealand and back home were her true subject, the thing that lit her up. Her writing, especially those early stories, is unique.” 

In his introduction to Farvel, Bill Manhire writes:

Like the oldest Norse tales, the Farvel stories have all the flair and pace of oral narrative . . . But a better way of describing their effect might be to borrow the image of embroidery which appears so often in them. Farvel is like a tapestry, with fresh scenes being added story by story until at the last the richness of a complex picture is revealed. And Yvonne du Fresne’s language can be like a needle flashing in and out of linen. Her writing has the intense, controlled exuberance of one of her Danish women at work on a piece of tapestry – human energy directed well.

Nina Nola writes in the  Oxford Companion to NZ Literature:

Critics operating from realist premises have struggled both with the blurred borderline between reality and fantasy, and the claim of Danish spiritual affinity with Maori in the two novels [Ester and Frédérique]. While they consistently celebrate du Fresne's sharp and exciting language, humorously employed to look ironi­cally at herself and her community, they are frequently uncomfortable with her construction of an indomitable immigrant community identity and its mythical connec­tion to another place, a superior homeland that is not England. This depiction of difference is a deliberate negotiation of New Zealandness in a distinctive style of voice du Fresne calls her “Danish clonk”.

 For Was I Not Born Here?: Identity and Culture in the Work of Yvonne Du Fresne, by the Norwegian academic Anne Holden Rønning, is available at Fishpond, and the NZ Book Council bio is here. 

Charlie Sheen

It is a law that every blog should comment on Mr Sheen and his current travails. So here we go:

If you had to invent a name for a drug-addled egomaniac TV star, wouldn’t “Charlie Sheen” be rejected as being too obvious? As in “Charlie” for the drugs and “Sheen” for the preening self-regard?

In years to come, which major rock star will he come to resemble? Charlie Sheen, this is your future:

Beware the Ides of March

Today is the Ides ofMarch here in New Zealand. My friend Kevin Ireland – poet, painter, novelist – alerted me to this with the words, “Watch your back.” 

Readers in other time zones still have the Ides to look forward to. You have been warned.

Sentence of the day

Danyl @Dim-Post explains why Phil Goff has ruled out Hone Harawira’s putative new party as a partner:

Presumably Harawira’s proposed policy of putting Phil Goff against a wall and shooting him is a factor here, although of all planks in Harawira’s agenda this is the policy item that would have the widest support amongst non-Maori voters.

Quite. Vernon Small reports that:

However Goff continued to leave the door open to NZ First led by Winston Peters, saying he would wait to see if Peters made it back into Parliament.

He said Peters had stuck with a Labour Government for three years and as Minister of Foreign Affairs he had acted in a way that was compatible with the support agreement.

But not always in a way that was compatible with dignity. I was never more proud of my nephew Simon than when he was at a meeting in Moscow, as one of several NZ residents there rounded up to meet our then Minister of Foreign Affairs, when he told Peters – who was in excessively convivial mode – that he was a disgrace to New Zealand. My nephew is the least censorious of men, and pretty convivial himself, so if he objected to Peters being excessively convivial, he (Peters) must have been royally excessively convivial. 

Phil Goff, who was a good minister of Foreign Affairs, would know exactly how well Peters performed his duties.

Help!

I am trapped in a house with five females. One is my wife so that’s OK but the other four are excitable girls aged from six to nine who have eaten birthday cake. Lots of birthday cake. It will be a long night and an even longer morning on Sunday.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Tomorrow we host a children’s birthday party so the house will be full of nine-year-old girls for the afternoon after they’ve been horse-riding in the morning and, yes, they will stay overnight. Sunday breakfast will be hell. 

Children’s parties these days often have a theme and live entertainment. We’re thinking along these lines:

The photo – click on it for an enlargement – is by David Mercado/Reuters and shows a member of the “Diablada Autentica” during the Carnival parade in Oruro, 200 km south of La Paz, Bolivia, on 5 March. For other parents with the same problem, there are more inspirational/aspirational photos like this – from Mardi Gras in New Orleans to Carnival in Rio – at The Big Picture.

What makes a great Kiwi book?

 That is the topic for tomorrow evening’s NZ Book Month event in Hamilton, at which I have to speak. In any other context than birds, the word “Kiwi” makes me shudder. 

I said as much to a booky friend who replied, “There should be a list of horrid words and they should be banned – starting with ‘booklover’ which is on the same loathsome scale as ‘jazzfest’.” Quite.

Any other suggestions for the List of Horrid Words? Or any suggestions for what to say about what makes a great Kiwi book?

Damien Wilkins, rock star

Who’d have thought? The author of the 1990 short-story collection The Veteran Perils (his debut), the 1993 poetry collection The Idles and novel The Miserables (I have read it twice, which I couldn’t say of many NZ novels not written by Vincent O’Sullivan) and half a dozen novels since, is about to release an album of his music, Group Hug by the Close Readers.

Product placement alert – if you go here, you will find a very stylish promotional package of graphic (the one above, which I assume is the cover art), text and a free download of some of the songs. No alarms and no surprises: they are good. 

And here is Nigel Cox’s profile of Damien Wilkins (along with Ian Cross) in Quote Unquote the magazine in 1993.